Monthly Archives: January 2015

(Excerpt from original post on the Taneja Group News Blog)

NexGen was one of the first real flash/hybrid with QoS storage solutions, and it leveraged PCIe flash (i.e. Fusion-IO cards) to great effect. Which we suppose had something to do with why Fusion-IO bought them up a couple of years ago. But whatever plans were in the works were likely messed up when SanDisk in-turn bought Fusion-IO because we haven’t heard form NexGen folks in awhile – not a good sign for a storage solution. Well, SanDisk has now spun NexGen back out on its own. While it may be sink or swim time for the NexGen team, we think it’s a good opportunity for all involved.

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchStorage.

Our crystal ball tells us this will be a year of change for the data storage market.

With another year just getting underway, we here at Taneja Group felt we needed a few analyst predictions to get things off on the right foot. The easiest predictions, and often the most likely ones, are that things will continue mostly as they are. But what fun is that? So, like any good fortune teller, we held hands around a crystal ball, gathered our prescient thoughts and with the help of the storage spirits came up with these six predictions for change in the data storage market for 2015.

The overall traditional storage market will stay relatively flat despite huge growth in big data and the onrushing Internet of Things. Most new big data will be unstructured and big data architectures like Hadoop will still tend to leverage DAS for storage. In addition, many big data players are pushing the data lake or hub concept to land even bigger chunks of other enterprise data on big data clusters. While we do see some salvation in this space from vendors […] that enable big data analysis to leverage traditional enterprise storage, it won’t be enough to make a big dent in 2015.We’ve also noticed that many storage shops have yet to take advantage of the emerging capacity optimizations now available (e.g., thin provisioning, linked clones, global deduplication, inline compression and so on) in recent versions of competitive arrays that are becoming table stakes for new acquisition decisions. Hybrid arrays, in particular, are bringing flash-enabling space efficiencies across their full complement of storage tiers, and most arrays these days are turning at least hybrid.

Speaking of flash, there are too many all-flash array (AFA) vendors and not enough differentiation. During 2012/2013 the first AFA vendors had the market to themselves, but with all the big players rolling out full-fledged flash offerings, opportunities are declining. With [many vendors] all pushing their own solutions (both AFA and hybrid), the remaining independent vendors will have a harder time finding a niche where they can survive. We also expect to see a new round of very high-end performance storage architectures in 2015[…]As a related trend, we anticipate that hybrid-based Tier-1 arrays will lose ground to AFAs in general, as the cost of flash drops and flash performance proves valuable to most if not all Tier-1 I/O. In virtualization environments, this trend will be somewhat lessened by the rise in popularity of server-side flash and/or memory caching/tiering solutions.

Data protection and other add-on storage capabilities will become more directly baked into storage solutions. We expect to see more traditional arrays follow the examples of

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchDataCenter.

No one sticks with their New Year’s resolution — where is that gym card anyway? — but you can pick up seven modern habits and feel good about fit, healthy IT ops.

Industry analysts like to make outlandish predictions at the start of every new year. But since I focus already on predicting the next big thing, I’ve decided to adopt another New Year’s tradition: making resolutions. But I have a problem with that too. I only have a few bad habits and am intent on keeping them.

Instead, I’m going to suggest some resolutions for organizations to adopt modern IT:

Do something predictive with big data. Don’t even worry about the big data part if “big” doesn’t come naturally to the top of your pile of opportunities. You can always grow into bigger data efforts. But do look for a starter project to leverage the power of prediction. Commit to a project that embeds predictive algorithms or machine learning to get accustomed to what it is, what it can and can’t do, and how to approach it profitably. Some areas to consider might be to explore inherent clusters in your customer or client base, to estimate which client or transaction will succeed or fail, or to identify the most likely root causes of support issues.

Reduce opex through hyperconvergence. Converged infrastructure is clearly a natural evolution under the ever-present pressure to reduce total cost of ownership. Hyperconvergence, which offers a single building block of data center infrastructure that bakes in server, storage and networking resources all into one scale-out unit, takes this process to the extreme. While it might not solve every problem, there is no doubt that a large portion of do-it-yourself data center architecture could profitably migrate onto hyperconverged platforms. If you aren’t ready to completely convert, at least resolve to evaluate hyperconverged solutions for new projects. And if that is too big a leap, at least deploy some software-defined storage this year to get comfortable with this potential “new order” for modern IT.

Accelerate your infrastructure. Several acceleration technologies, like caching and in-memory processing, can easily drop into an IT environment with little effort, cost or risk. Although downstream users may complain about poor performance, they rarely ask if acceptable service could be accelerated 10x or 100x or more. Resolve to improve on the “satisfactory,” not just oiling the squeaky wheels, because acceleration technologies can spur noticeable improvements in quality of service. They can also lead to huge productivity gains for many, if not all, applications, to the point of creating competitive differentiation or even new sources of revenue.

RT @TruthinIT: There's no cost of goods like a traditional NAS device where I've got disks I've got to pay for. And if I'm not using the data on those disks, I still got to pay for those disks. bit.ly/2BBX073@Nasuni@smworldbigdata

In 30 min I'm interviewing @Cohesity (and customer) on @TruthinIT about Mass Data Fragmentation. It's about having too many copies in about four or five different "dimensions", including cloud! Join us webcast (12.11.18) @ 1pmET (and there will be prizes) bit.ly/2PdqrQn